A Plea to Redefine the Contours of Translation Pedagogy in Pakistan: Towards a Translation Performativity Paradigm

Abstract

The paper looks into the possibilities as well as challenges of moving the translation pedagogy in Pakistan away from its traditional methodological stasis and putting it on more self-reflective and communicative grounds. The researchers advance a critique of the mainstream translation teaching in Pakistan and, alternatively, propose what they call communicative performativities of translation. The issues of equivalence, correspondence, corrective/prescriptive feedback, acontextuality and teacher-directed drilling are assessed and found not merely wanting but positively counterproductive. The researchers propose that manipulating linguistic structures from the source language to the target language, or vice versa, should be more appropriately called transcoding than translation. This manipulation usually takes place in a rather mechanical way with the help of dictionary meanings and unproblematic, decontextualized equivalents. This approach prevents students from achieving inter-lingual communicative adequacy and pragmatic competence in translation. On the other hand, the researchers present alternative ways of conceptualizing and practicing translation in classrooms and for this purpose they propose four tasks which are located in the larger framework of Donald Kiraly’s Activity Theory-Based Social Constructivist Model (ATSM).